


Heroic

by stellarbird



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-09
Updated: 2012-01-09
Packaged: 2017-10-29 06:26:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellarbird/pseuds/stellarbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For someone so terrible, you think, Vriska Serket can be very hard to hate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heroic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gogollescent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/gifts).



> Prompt: In the doomed timeline in which Terezi fails to kill Vriska, there are two survivors: the Hero of Light, and the Hero of Time. What do they do with themselves, in the end that never was?

When you find Vriska, she has a lance through her abdomen.

There is blood all over her, cold and wet on her chest and face, making streaks of blue on her pale gray skin and the blinding orange of her tunic.

“Took you long enough, Megido.”

“You lost.”

She shakes her head, trying to grin. “Marquise Spinneret Mindfang always wins,” she says. Her head jerks painfully to the left, and you turn to look. Jack looks smaller, somehow, in death, and you spend a few minutes staring at him before a choking breath makes you turn back to the girl slowly bleeding to death in front of you.

“It really hurts having a lance sticking out of your stomach,” she says. “A loooooooot. Did you know that?”

“You’re going to die, Vriska.”

“No. Not – not heroic, at all, I – so stupid – I tripped-“

Her eyes flicker closed, and you pull the lance out of her and wipe it carefully on her sleeve. A little more blood won’t make too much of a difference.

Sure enough, Vriska’s body goes green and red and purple and yellow for a bit, all flashing, dying, burning colors, and she opens her eyes and punches you in the nose. You think you liked her better when she was dying.

“That’s for killing me, you psycho robot fairy bitch!”

Vriska Serket is loud and irritating and you’re no Kanaya but her burning orange and red outfit hurts your eyes and any sense of decorum ram mom ever tried to push into you. Your nose really hurts, her insults are _terrible,_ and you hate her _so much_. It’s sort of romantic, you think, the two of you sitting here, alone and in hate.

 “Where is everyone?” you ask.

She starts to giggle - horrible, maddening little noises bubbling out of her throat and exploding in your face. You want to slap her, but you don’t. Why don’t you?

“They’re dead,” she says. “They’re all dead! All of them.” She’s still giggling as she grabs your head and kisses you on the mouth, and this time, you do slap her.

You leave her laughing on the floor, and you go to find the bodies.

 

* * *

 

They look peaceful. There are fourteen of them, not including Jack, who Vriska has taken off already to use as some kind of morbid hunting trophy. You carry them into one of the coldest rooms and arrange them around you in a circle. First in hemospectrum order, but then that feels wrong and you move a few people around, but that doesn’t feel right either. Try as you might, you can’t shake the feeling that someone is missing.

You kneel by Sollux, who is wearing Feferi’s goggles and still has his familiar upset little crease between his eyebrows. You kiss it, smooth his hair, get mustard-yellow blood on your hands and face, but who cares? You cradle his little head in your lap and croon at him like a little grub, rub circles on his sturdy little hacker hands with their always-unkempt claws. He is beautiful, and you sigh and lean your cheek against his.

You hear a slight noise, and you look up to see Vriska staring at you from the doorway.

You expect her to make some kind of comment, some kind of vowel-filled, insincere, disgusting condescending highblood snark, but instead she just stares at you with an incomprehensible expression on her face.

“Get out,” you say, and your voice has a quality to it that it hasn’t had ever since you stopped being dead.

“Megido-“

You don’t let her finish, picking up Karkat’s scythe from next to you and throwing it at her. She holds out an arm to protect her face and it cuts her, drawing a single line of cerulean down her forearm.

 _“Get out.”_

 

* * *

 

Your name is Vriska Serket, and you have never felt so alone.

Whenever you try and contact John, his screen shows up black. Even when you try and troll him at some point in his past, there is nothing, just the emptiness of a completely dark screen. When you try to troll some of the other kids to figure out what the hell is going on, the same thing happens. You never needed him anyway, you tell yourself, and then laugh out loud because you know what a lie it is.

The only other troll on the meteor hates you with a passion that seems to flip randomly between platonic and romantic, and she spends most of her time in a freezing cold room shooshing corpses anyway. You haven’t repeated the mistake of going to find her again; you still remember the way she looked at you – not hate, hate you’re used to, but loathing. As a cerulean blood with wicked mind control powers and astronomically high FLARP levels you never really knew what it felt like to be completely unwanted somewhere.

You do now.

 

* * *

 

You like it in the corpse room. It is very quiet there, and you can sit and think and talk and not have anyone interrupt you. On the rare occasions that you leave, you try not to see Vriska, but sometimes your paths cross and you glare at each other in a bout of pathetic black flirting. A kismesissitude with Vriska should be easy; gog knows she’s hateable enough. She’s also never around. You’re not quite sure what she spends her time doing, but it seems to involve a lot of banging angrily on computer keyboards.

Once, you go to find her, determined to try and move your stagnant relationship forward somehow. She’s in a back room hidden behind mounds of useless junk, that she’s collected from around the meteor, and as you navigate piles of FLARPing gear and boonbucks you think of Tavros and you think of Terezi and you find it even easier to hate her than you normally do. You’re ready to rip the door open, kick her in the bone bulge, kiss the hell out of her and slam her against the wall so hard that you finally get her to cry. She hasn’t cried yet.

When you reach the door, though, you can hear music. You open it quietly and see Vriska hugging a plush rabbit she seems to have alchemized, staring at a computer screen.

“How do I liiiiiiiive without you,” someone sings. She’s taped a picture on the wall of a boy with black hair and buckteeth and a goofy grin that reminds you a little of Tavros, and you quietly slide the door closed and leave.

For someone so terrible, you think, Vriska Serket can be very hard to hate.

 

* * *

 

The next time you two meet, she looks absolutely disgusting.

Vriska looking disgusting is not an abnormal state of events. Her hair is all wild and tangled in her horns, and you think you can see pieces of food caught in it. She looks utterly _revolting_.

“Can’t you even try to take care of yourself, Vriska?” you sigh at her, and she glares at you and makes an obscene hand gesture.

“I don’t care about looking nice, Megido,” she snaps. “What is there to care about? We’re doomed, we can’t die, everyone else is dead, and you can flutter along like everything is totally great, you have your corpses and whatever, but I am completely past giving a shit about anything! I. Don’t. Caaaaaaaare!”

She picks up a wad of boondollars lying next to her and throws it at you, and it manages to get halfway before falling to the floor and skittering sadly to a halt. Her clothes are covered with dust and hair, her eyes are ringed with dark circles that tell you she’s been paying as much attention to her sleeping habits as her hygiene, and yes, there are dried pieces of sopor in her hair. She is gross and filthy and disgusting, and you have _had it_.

You walk up to her and freeze her in time. One of Equius’s broken arrows is lying nearby on the ground, and you pick it up and wave it in front of her face. Her eyes fail to widen in fear or surprise – she knows you can’t kill her, and she’s beyond caring about anything less. Vriska Serket is not living as much as she is existing.

You grab a lock of her hair, dirty and tangled and much too long, and you use the edge of the arrow to saw most of it off. She wants to flinch, you can feel it, and you saw off another lock. The hair floats to the ground, black against the cold industrial grey. Everything is grey. The meteor is grey. The walls are grey. Vriska is grey, both inside and out.

You draw the edge of the arrowhead to cut off another lock. It goes _snick_ as it slices. You keep going, and each _snick_ is you driving an arrow into the wall of passivity that Vriska has put up around her.

When you are done, you let her go and shove a computer screen – lost and abandoned, black and blank – in front of her. She stares at her reflection for a second, and her entire face implodes like she is trying very, very hard, not to break down and scream.

You look at her. Her hair is twisted into sharp shapes, sharp and spiky, and it comes to an end by her shoulders. She looks like-

“Terezi,” she whispers. “You made me look like Terezi.”

She collapses on you and begins to cry, shoulders shuddering, sobs sounding like they’re being ripped out of her by force, blue-tinted tears drenching your robe. You watch her cry, and you realize that you are not in hate with Vriska Serket.

Oh, you _hate_ her. That’s different.

But she doesn’t need a kismesis right now, and neither do you.

What she needs is a moirail, and so you wrap your arms around her and the two of you hold each other and cry for everything you thought you were going to have.

 

* * *

 

It’s strange, having a moirail again. It’s strange, but not too bad, you think, as Aradia rolls her eyes again and practically throws the food at you. She’s not like Kanaya – she doesn’t meddle, doesn’t try and clean your room or fix your clothes. She just glares at you and rolls her eyes and insults you back whenever you insult her. But when you feel yourself starting to cry again, or you sit down on the floor and go very, very quiet, she wraps her arms around you and whispers you stories. You feel less bone-crushingly alone when she does that.

 

* * *

 

It’s strange, having a moirail again. It’s even stranger having one that you hate, and it’s strangest that it’s Vriska Serket.

But you pity her more than you hate her; you pity her because even if she’s a god, there’s a part of her that’s already dead. It’s the part that makes her go very quiet and still sometimes, and it’s the part of her that worries and gnaws at the other parts.

You know this because you talk to her now; she even comes into the corpse room sometimes and strokes Terezi’s hair and cries. When she does that, you sit there and you hold her, and something about holding her like that makes you feel more whole. She talks to you, rambles about FLARPing and levels and _failure_ , and it’s through these talks that you learn that Vriska wants to die.

She’s tried it, she tells you. She’s tried thinking _extra hard_ about her crimes before hanging herself from one of the ropes Terezi left behind, but it didn’t work. None of them worked.

You’ve tried as a moirail. You’ve tried to talk to her about the dream bubbles, about how life on the meteor won’t be that bad, really, but nothing works. She can access the dream bubbles, she says, when she’s dead.

So you sit by yourself for a while and you think, and afterwards you find Vriska and you two go back down to the room where your friends are. Vriska lies down with her head on your lap and you hold Karkat’s scythe over her head.

“It won’t work,” she says.

“It will,” you say, and you slit her throat.

 

* * *

 

 _The death must be either heroic or just.  
TT: How are those terms defined?   
Broadly, mysteriously, and according to the case of the individual. _

 

* * *

 

Blood spills out, warm and blue, and her eyes stare up at you, unblinking. Gently, lovingly, you close them so she looks like she could almost be sleeping. She is lying next to Terezi, and for the first time, the circle looks right.

You bend down and kiss Vriska lightly on the forehead.

You are truly alone. She’s not coming back.

 _The death must be either heroic or just._

There was never a rule, you think, about who is the hero.


End file.
